There are only three Tory leadership candidates that matter – and two of them are Boris Johnson.
... One served as mayor of London from 2008-2016. He has liberal, metropolitan instincts – broadly pro-immigration, old-fashioned in his use of idiom, but a moderniser at heart. That Johnson was once celebrated by his party as the
“Heineken candidate” because, in homage to the old advertising slogan, he could refresh parts of the electorate that other Tories couldn’t reach. He won in the capital, a Labour heartland. Twice.
Then there is 2016-2019 Johnson, figurehead of the Vote Leave campaign, the ultimate Brexit-booster. He is a more aggressive, divisive figure – a partisan of nationalistic culture wars who has
consorted with Steve Bannon, the notorious alt-right ideologue inside Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. This is the Johnson who compares Muslim women in burqas to “letterboxes” and who
defended the jibe yesterday as a bit of unvarnished plain-speaking – the kind of thing the public prefers to “bureaucratic platitudes”. This is post-truth, Trumpesque Johnson who threatens to take the UK out of the EU with no deal and to renege on financial commitments already made to Brussels. He would build an invisible wall and make Ireland pay for it.
Both Johnsons are dispensing wild promises to Tory MPs behind closed doors. Moderates and former remainers have been led to understand that London Johnson is the real one; that he does truly understand the perils of no-deal Brexit, that his domestic policy agenda would not be some turbo-Thatcherite slash-and-burn charge to the right. On the contrary, a liberal social reformer would emerge to renew Conservatism for the benefit of people who feel economically left behind.
Meanwhile, Trumpy Johnson is reassuring hardline Brexiteers that nothing is off the table – not even a prorogation of parliament – in the drive to get the UK out of the EU at any cost. He
cuts taxes for high-earners and lights the bonfire of regulation that Eurosceptic ultras have always seen as the festive culmination of their drive for liberation from Brussels. This Johnson promises to win back voters from Nigel Farage. He is the one that
most Tory members (including an unquantified caucus of newly arrived ex-Ukippers) seem to think they are getting. But the other Johnson is meant to lead a different kind of electoral recovery, shoring up seats that could be lost because pro-European Conservatives flock to the Lib Dems or stay at home on polling day. Self-styled “One Nation” Conservatives and rightwing ultras each seem to think the other side is being taken for a ride, which suggests they all are.
It is possible that this strategy will unravel before the end of the contest. Maybe enough people will be put off by the flagrant duplicity that a non-Johnson candidate can somehow navigate a path to victory. But with two Boris Johnsons running, and both likely to make the final round, the laws of probability alone point to someone of that name being our next prime minister. Who he really is, what, if anything, he believes, and what he might be capable of doing is anybody’s guess.
